Engineering: Royal Academy medals awarded

 

Four UK engineers have been awarded the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering’s silver medal for their outstanding contribution to the discipline.

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"The greatest inventor is the engineer," said Academy President Lord Browne of Madingley.

"Engineers approach a problem in a manner which is both visionary and realistic – they draw simultaneously on science and business to provide solutions to challenges through the application of new technology."

The Silver Medallists include Professor Gehan Amaratunga - the Head of the Electronics, Power and Energy Conversion group at Cambridge University’s Engineering Department.

He received the Silver Medal for his pioneering development of special silicon chips with built-in high voltage power-switching devices which are used in the AC/DC converters essential for most consumer electronics.

Amaratunga has formed several successful companies to commercialise his work, and his latest project is to develop nanoscale supercapacitors to replace batteries in products from electric vehicles to PDAs.

The engineer and his team have grown forests of multi-walled carbon tubes just billionths of a metre wide.

When sandwiched with silicon nitride between niobium and aluminium electrodes they create a tiny capacitor that packs a real punch in terms of energy storage.

Another winner was the Director of Imperial College London’s Energy Futures Lab and Shell Chair in Sustainable Development in Energy, Professor Nigel Brandon, who has led the way in fuel cell technology in the UK.

He was co-inventor of the Rolls Royce Integrated Planar Solid Oxide Fuel Cell, which operates at over 900 degrees Centigrade and can be integrated with a gas turbine.

This gives megawatt scale power generation with 70 per cent efficiency and is now exploited through Rolls Royce Fuel Cell Systems.

Professor Brandon also co-invented a novel metal-supported solid oxide fuel cell, and this work was spun out from Imperial College in 2001 to form Ceres Power with him as CEO.

He is now Chief Scientist of the company, which successfully entered the AIM Market of the London Stock Exchange in 2004.

Biomedical and built environment engineers recognised

Another Silver Medallist, Professor Christofer Toumazou, heads the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and is a world leader in current-mode analogue signal processing.

During his PhD research, Professor Toumazou tried giving current rather than voltage the main role in signal processing. This apparently simple insight transformed analogue signal processing, improving performance and slashing power consumption, which was critical for several applications.

His work has recently moved towards bioengineering and he is now using ultra low power wireless to communicate with biosensors attached to or implanted in the human body.

A complete cochlear implant is now in clinical trials and he is also developing a portable real-time DNA sequencer – a major step on the road to personalised medicine.

Silver Medallist Professor Chris Wise is one of what the architect Lord Rogers of Riverside calls a new generation of built environment engineers.

His legacy includes the pioneering Commerzbank in Frankfurt – 290 metres tall and the world’s first ‘green’ skyscraper.

At Arup, where he spent the early part of his career, he designed London’s well-known Millennium Bridge with Anthony Caro and Norman Foster.

With his team at Expedition Engineering, a new company he set up in 1999, Professor Wise's latest projects include Italy’s tallest building, the 220 metre Sanpaolo Bank HQ with architect Renzo Piano.

They have also designed two huge hydrogen fuel-cell powered ‘walking buildings’ to be used as research bases on Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf with Hopkins Architects.

After less than ten years Expedition now turns over £4 million a year and has just received its 200th commission.

Lord Browne presented the medals at the Academy Awards Dinner in London on Tuesday 5 June.

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